


the family of things

by iimpavid, scarebeast



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Death, Dahlias and Roses, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 21:22:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17650091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarebeast/pseuds/scarebeast
Summary: "You brought flowers for the lady," she reminded him.





	the family of things

**Author's Note:**

> Let me warn y'all now that this is very short and very sad. Any and all complaints may be directed toward scarebeast because this was THEIR FREAKIN' IDEA.

Buddy stood backlit against the setting sun on some skyscraper in some Earth city whose name she couldn’t remember. It had spent a very long time rebuilding from its own ashes. Her shadow stretched far ahead of her, proportions skewed into unnatural spindles that spilled off the tinted glass roof’s far edge— right beside where her best friend in the entire galaxy sat.

With his back to her, he looked remarkably healthy. He watched traffic flitting by on the hover highway, cars’ hulls refracting sunlight almost too bright to stand. Every once in a while he would turn in profile— the angles of his jaw and cheek a were little too pronounced but she could see that his makeup was flawless. A full bottle of champagne sat at his elbow, unopened.

He didn’t flinch or look toward her as she approached and sat down beside him.

She was glad for having chosen t-strap heels. Dangling off a hundred stories, it felt like the planet was tugging her down by the soles of her feet. Beside her, Peter was already missing one of his pumps, one bare foot swinging in the breeze.

* * *

 _Peter_.

That was something she’d learned over the course of the last year: his name.

The first place he’d gone, with blood still drying in palmprint streaks down his blouse, was Brahma.

She’d sprung him from Brahman military custody. The single most-difficult heist she’d ever executed. One that had, ultimately, failed.

“The most-wanted terrorist in Brahman modern history. That’s quite the title to earn at 17.” She’d stood outside his maximum cell in her stolen officer’s uniform with her hands on her hips. “Why did you come back here?”

“Surveillance is still running, _captain_.” He looked through her. The arrest had broken his glasses and it wasn’t worth the headache to try to focus.

“It is. Not for long.”

On cue her hard-won EMP went off and the entire prison went dark. The deep red emergency lights only flickered on for a moment before the second blast took out the generator. The electrical field around his cell vanished. His magnetic shackles dropped from his body like dead snakes.

Peter sat unmoving.

Buddy stomped over to him and pulled him up from the floor by the shoulders his prison jumpsuit. “C’mon. We have five minutes to get you dressed and out of here.”

“Buddy, no—”

“Buddy, yes,” she retorted. "You’re not going to stay here and be executed by anyone for _anything_. I don’t give a shit what you’ve done or think you deserve right now. You’re coming with me.”

It should have perturbed her that he let himself be led. Prison-issue slippers shuffling against the tile. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. She should have expected it.

The moment they broke out of Brahma’s gravity he drugged her. Jettisoned her off her own ship in an escape pod and set the tone for the next year.

* * *

 

Their mutual silence only lasted as long as Peter’s patience— “Can’t you take a hint?”— he’d gotten so damn rude.

“That depends on what’s being hinted at, darling.”

He scoffed. “Do you _ever_ stop? Is relentless antagonism your new trademark?”

“If you’re referring to my refusal to stop following my obviously-grieving and possibly-suicidal best friend, no, I don’t ever stop. I won’t. I refuse to.”

“I’m not suicidal, Buddy.”

“Doesn’t look that way from where I’m standing, babe. Metaphorically-standing, anyway.”

He turned to her with an inscrutable expression.

She hadn’t had the luxury of looking at him for so long he seemed like a different person. The intense gravity of the planet didn’t seem to affect him at all. His posture was perfect. He’d gotten thinner. Weariness was written into every line of his face— and there were more of them now. White streaked through his hair from the temples on back.

She wanted, more than anything, to reach out and touch him. Pull him into her arms and never, ever let go. But if she did— she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to catch up with him if he ran again.

“Champagne?” He held the bottle out to her.

“I never turn down other people’s booze.” She opened it with minimal drama, easing the cork free with strong, steady hands.

The sounds of traffic seemed miles away. They drank. Distant sirens wailed. Somewhere, many floors below them, a party carried on without so much as noticing their absence.

“I don’t know how to explain myself,” Peter said.

“You don’t have to.”

He made a disbelieving noise around another mouthful of champagne.

“I’m serious,” she said, “ You never have to explain yourself to me. Certainly not about somethin’ like this.”

“So you’re content to just let me run away from reality for as long as I like?”

“That’s not what I said. You’ve gotta face it eventually... but you don’t gotta face it alone.”

She extended a hand to take the bottle back from him— Peter made eye contact with her then dropped it off the roof to the skyscraper. Buddy didn’t watch it fall. She was dizzy enough. The sound of its shattering on a lower tier of the building was swallowed up in the rush of wind. “Be petulant all you want, I’m not going away, and if you leave, I’m going to follow you again.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“And what if I went back to Mars?”

“Then we would go back to Mars. I wouldn’t mind the lower gravity, personally. It’s kinder on the joints.”

* * *

Hyperion City Cemetery was vast. A dusty plain in its own atmospheric dome half an hour’s drive outside of the city.

Grave markers jutted out of the desert expanse in neat rows, some of them shaded by pinyons or sparse devil grass. Those who couldn’t afford a plot all their own were on the far side. Mausoleums-- stacked full of tidy rows of small-boxed bones with shared altars-- stood on the crest of the the one hill. Gnarled pinyons grew around it, too, a copse of them. A suitable windbreak for the wealthier dead below.

Peter and Buddy stood outside it for a long time. They had dressed for the occasion at Buddy’s insistence, _You’ll feel better if you dress the part_ , she’d promised him— an echo of his own words, repeated often over the course of his career to new thieves and cons just beginning to hone their skills. In his black on black suit, gloves, and mourning veil, Peter did not feel any better at all.

“I can’t do this.”

They were the first words to come out of his mouth since they’d landed on Mars.

Buddy stood beside him and waited for him to find his resolve. She held a bouquet. It was nothing but a mass of blood-red roses, which Peter had spent their lunch date de-thorning, punctuated with gigantic, creamy dahlias. Their combined smell was overwhelming, even in the thin Martian air.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “I just… can’t.”

“You don’t have to. He’s not going anywhere.”

A bewildered pause fell. Then Peter made a disgusted noise and started walking away from her— toward the mausoleum entrance. “I can’t believe you would say something like that about a dead person— that you would be so, so insensitive, so callous—“

“Hey, it got you moving, didn’t it?”

“—I’m not going to dignify it with a response.”

They walked the slender rows scanning names and nearly walked past it. After all, there were ranks even in a pauper’s grave, some easier to overlook than others, and the Steel family was in the bottom row the middle of a center aisle.

“They put him between his mother and brother,” Peter told her, sounding distant. “I couldn’t have picked a better arrangement myself.”

Then he dropped like his strings had been cut. The aisle was narrow— how they got coffins in and out of the walls Buddy couldn’t guess— and he didn’t seem to feel the impact he made against the dead stacked behind him. He slid to the floor. His veil slipped off.

Buddy knelt beside him. “Peter—“

“ _Don’t touch me_.” He said it like it hurt him to breathe.

Buddy didn’t touch him.

Peter’s shoulders convulsed. He stripped off his gloves. Reached a hand toward Juno’s name— _Juno Steel, Private Eye Beloved Friend & Boss, Gone But Not Forgotten_ — and withdrew it before he could touch the cold stone.

Engraved in marble in commanding font, it was so horribly permanent.

If the conditions were right it would outlast civilization.

An artifact of Martian history to be discovered in some far flung future, then analyzed, displayed, bought, sold, stolen.

He clamped a hand over his mouth to smother the sound he made. A pained moan that seemed to rise from his toes and fill every inch of him.

There wasn’t a single thought in his head.

Only the feeling of being aware, all at once without a single pause for decency, that something he needed very badly had gone missing. It was one thing to be missing a vital clue or a weapon or ransom money— he had talked himself out of so many situations where that single missing piece could have cost him his life.

But Juno Steel was dead.

Even Peter Nureyev couldn’t negotiate with that.

He curled in on himself. He sobbed and shook and looked again and again at the reality that Juno was dead— until he thought his chest would unspool. Everything that made him would come undone and drift off into the atmosphere and never be whole again.

Only that didn’t happen.

When he could feel himself breathing again— hair damp with sweat, aching and swollen eyes, dry and fuzzy tongue, coughing and gagging on mucus at intervals— he hadn’t unraveled at all. That would have been too easy.

Peter blinked and blinked and blinked until he realized his eyes were focusing well enough, his glasses were just smeared with tears and skin oil and slowly-drying salt. He took them off. He breathed unevenly— through his mouth because he was never going to be able to breathe through his nose ever again. His face felt terribly hot. From the neck down he was freezing, long limbs still seized by bouts of uncontrolled trembling.

Then there were flowers in front of him. Buddy shoved them into his lap like that was just something they did. Dahlias and roses.

He looked at Buddy, completely lost.

“You brought flowers for the lady,” she reminded him. He couldn’t make out her features but from the sound of her voice, she’d been crying, too.

Careful with his shaky hands, he pressed his face into them. Red and cream petals soft enough to sleep on and so fresh he could smell them even with his sinuses so congested he could hardly breathe.

He laid them just in front of Juno’s grave and fussed over the fall of the tissue they were wrapped in, the angle of the bow tied around them, which blooms were faced just so, until there wasn’t anything else he could see to fix. He knelt there, sniffling occasionally, rubbing absently at his eyes which had begun to itch from the pollen and the crying.

Finally, because his legs were starting to cramp and he couldn’t remember how to stand or move, he had barely remembered breathing, he told Buddy, “I don’t want to leave him.”

“You don’t have to. He’s not going anywhere.” She was scared he would start crying again— but his center held and he gave a watery laugh instead.

“No, I guess he isn’t.”

Red-faced and hurting, he leaned back again to rub his face clean with the black handkerchief he’d brought along. He managed to get the worst of the make up streaked beneath and around his eyes— he wouldn’t notice the black that had dripped and dried down his cheeks and been smeared into his hairline until later.

“Yes, alright,” he said to himself, not taking his eyes off Juno’s grave. “I can’t stay here forever.”

Buddy helped him up. Their groans filled the empty crypt, stiff muscles and joints popping as they coaxed their bodies back to something resembling standing. Buddy offered Peter his veil back.

“Do I look that terrible?”

“Yes,” she nodded, “And there’s a wind storm coming, so you’re gonna want it. I saw on the news this morning.”

Peter scoffed and pulled her into a rib-aching hug. “Only you would pay attention to the weather in these circumstances.”

“One of us has to.” She squeezed him back just as hard.

She held him and stood there with him until he could stand to breathe on his own again.

**Author's Note:**

> Sam: What would Peter do if Juno died?"  
> Me: you mean, like, in general?  
> Sam: Yeah  
> Me: writes this fic
> 
> additional items to rub salt in the wound:  
> 1) Rita nearly tore her hair out trying to come up with Juno's epitaph so Mick helped her out.  
> 2)Mick Mercury, who for some godawful and terrible reason outlived Juno Steel, wrote what got written on Juno's headstone.  
> 3) I don't know how Juno died for certain but I'm reasonably confident it was the direct result of something Peter did or failed to do.  
> 4) The one copy of Juno's death plan they could find specifically requested his burial location  
> 5) Peter has shot at Buddy several times over the course of his year refusing to face reality and landed a couple of them, too. She's persistent.  
> 6) Attendance to Juno's funeral was astronomically high, even among those people who supposedly hate him. It was front page news for days.
> 
> Remember: your comments sustain me


End file.
